Monday, June 22, 2009

The Choices lull is over. The schedule book revealed that I’m booked solid for the next several weeks. I’d established a new Earn While You Learn client and visited with another young married lady in for a pregnancy test when we got a phone call. “Do ya’ll do abortions there? My friend wants an abortion.” We got her friend right in. In all honesty, she didn’t seem terribly crisis. She wanted an abortion because she already had a couple of children and she had a little pressure to get one—but nothing violent and she also had lots of support. She admitted she knew little about abortion procedures or risks—but she wanted the truth. We walked through the gestational progression of an infant in the womb. I could see her eyes soften as she looked at the detailed pictures of tiny, unborn babies. Tears formed in her eyes as I explained the abortion procedures and she whispered, “That’s horrible.” Then I shared the possible risks to her and some common Post Abortive symptoms—depression, relationship issues, suicidal thoughts, guilt, anniversary grief, alcohol and substance abuse. She seemed to reach eagerly for the good news of the gospel. We couldn’t really tell how far along she was. “Will you come back in a week for an ultrasound?” Becky asked her and she agreed. “I think she’ll come back,” Becky told me. “I really do.” And I agreed. Every time I hear a girl tell me why she wants an abortion, my heart breaks. What a trap each of these women has fallen into! A trap in which there is no easy way out, but deception makes appear easy the most dark and despairing choice—to destroy their own children and, in so doing, their own lives. It’s a quick fix, some say, but I have yet to meet a woman who has endured an abortion who is not suffering—silently, miserably, guiltily suffering. So much for women’s liberation. I hate the bondage of so-called liberation. “You can be like God,” the serpent told Eve. Our culture tells them the same thing, “You can be like God—choosing life or death for your child.” Yet life is sacred—belonging to God. All life. The father’s. The mother’s. The child’s. Satan hates the seed of the woman. Diabolically. And when he tells each woman she can be like God, discerning good and evil and she rejects God’s perfect purpose for her—to sustain life—then comes death. For the baby and for her. The clichés of the pro-life movement, though well-meant, are too shallow to encompass the reality of abortion. “Abortion stops a beating heart” we chant. Well. It does. But it also breaks a beating heart.